Democratic Western New York U.S. Rep. Tim Kennedy recently released a letter from U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, which confirmed reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was expanding its detention facility in Batavia, near Buffalo. The expansion is intended to allow the facility to house women detainees.
Jose Sandoval is the Latino Communities Reporter through Report for America at WXXI News in Rochester, New York. Sandoval reported on the ICE facility's expansion. WAMC’s Maryam Ahmad spoke with him about what the immigrant community in Rochester looks like, and how ICE enforcement actions have affected the region.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sandoval: You have a couple thousand H-2A seasonal workers who come up here through the program, but then you also have folks who have decided to stay here and work because we also have a lot of dairy farms as well, and those are [not] seasonal. So, it doesn't qualify under the H-2A program, and so you have a lot of the families that have decided to stick around in more rural parts of the region, and so it's comprised of Mexicans.
But then you also have a lot of folks from Jamaica that also come up here and work some of the fields as well. But then you have also seen an increasing presence of folks from Afghanistan who have also decided to settle in the area as well. And then, also, you have a lot of folks from Ukraine who recently have also come through. Once the war started, they also decided to, you know, resettle into the area as well. So, it's a wide mixture, different community as well.
But like I said, you're also seeing an increasing presence of Venezuelans and Ecuadorians, folks from Central and South America, after some of the bigger cities were shipping these migrants to different cities, a local nonprofit here, Ibero (Ibero-American Action League), helped out with resettling some of these families into the area, and so now you have a couple hundred families that also recently came just a few years ago.
Ahmad: I was curious about one thing when it comes to the ongoing ICE enforcement actions: Obviously, on the state level, we have the 287(g) ban that's gone into effect. For us here in the Capital Region, there's generally a pattern of people being held in county jails before being taken to the Buffalo detention facility. What does that pattern look like in your region?
Sandoval: So typically, of course, the Buffalo Service Processing Center Batavia is a men-only facility at the moment, and so you have folks who, specifically, if men are detained, they're taken to that processing center over in Batavia. Now, for women, there's no facility for women who are detained in upstate New York, and especially now with the new law that the governor passed, local county jails can't really house women. So, beforehand it was, folks being maybe sent to Louisiana or another facility and then having to come back. But now there's been an update regarding the expansion of the facility in Batavia. So, previously it was a 650-bed capacity facility, men only. But with recent contracts that have been updated, and reporting that we were able to look upon, the facility is now expanding to a 100…it's a soft-sided facility that we believe has to potentially be a temp facility, so that will house women as well. And so now that's another major update to that processing center over in Batavia. But typically, folks that are sent there are specifically men.
Ahmad: You mentioned "soft-sided" facility. What exactly does that mean?
Sandoval: So, my colleague Brian and I were doing some reporting on this, and we looked at the contracts, and the contracts come from USA Spending, which is an official open data source of federal spending. So, anybody has access to it; they can look at it. The soft-sided facility, we believe, is a temp facility. So, for example, Alligator Alcatraz was a soft-sided facility. What exactly that is, we still don't know. We've reached out to DHS and ICE. We didn't really get clarity of what is going to be built there. We do know for a fact it is just for housing women. It's a roughly $17 million expansion. But do we know exactly what's going to be built? We have no idea. We've been trying to gain clarity on what exactly a soft-sided facility is and what it's going to look like, but to no luck.
Ahmad: You know, we're talking about enforcement actions and the impacts on these communities. How are communities responding to this action right now? You mentioned nonprofit organizations helping out - what does that community response look like?
Sandoval: You have a lot of nonprofit organizations that are really helping out. You also have rapid response groups that are really helping out as well. And so that response from a lot of these organizations that help out communities has been, at times, if they needed to, you know, delivering groceries or helping drive people around. So that's been the main response from a lot of these different organizations: to kind of set up things like that where they'll drive people around.
Ahmad: We've talked a bit about the rich nature of the Latino community in the Rochester area and in your region. What are stories or things you're looking to follow next?
Sandoval: You know, this is a very new beat, so covering Latino communities is very new for WXXI News, and so I'm trying to get different stories, just talking about the lives of folks in different parts of the region. So, stories on: who are these H-2A workers, who are these people that are working in the fields, and other similar stories. Profiling some of the other people in our region. But then, you know, there's some other stuff too that's kind of in the pocket, taking a little bit of time.
When it comes to immigrant communities and stories, and especially as journalists, that trust takes a little bit of time to really build. And specifically covering Latino communities or any immigrant communities, I think it changes on the daily; [it] changes weekly. And so at times, you just kind of have to go with the flow.
